Najib spinning old economic agenda

If Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak wants to transform the economy, he should abandon his cradle-to-grave economic strategy.

COMMENT

It’s budget time again, so let’s talk more about Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s economic agenda.

The early indications show that Najib is all talk when it comes to economic strategies. His government can’t seem to curb spending. He hasn’t done any transformation actually.

It’s all big talk.

His transformation means increased government spending, direct government involvement in the economy including owning the means of production or doing business through proxy companies.

We are as such led to ask, does Najib understand what he is doing?

I know he has only one economic strategy – spend to buy votes.

It’s all motion with no substance of creating the fundamentals of economic growth.

And this includes nurturing organic growth and reducing government interference and teaching Malays, for example, to take personal responsibility over their own affairs and looking out for unnecessary government wasteful spending.

If Najib wants to transform the economy, he should abandon his from cradle-to-grave economic strategy.

He’s giving out money to people which of course is an immediate stress reliever.

Slave-owner-slave economics

But in the long run, it snuffs out the drive in the people and reducing them to expectant beneficiaries of free lunches.

Umno is creating the slave owner-slave-economic relationship.

What does Najib mean by New Economic Model?

Once upon a time, I asked him about his NEM and he explained that it was market-driven economic affirmative action.

But I thought it sounded like unplanned capitalism or that spontaneous voluntary cooperation between economic actors.

It wasn’t any of that at all. It was and remains the the same old strategy of selecting close friends as principal business agents.

Spending has taken up a big proportion of our national income.

The government spends by creating debt instruments – borrowing from banks and issuing government bonds.

Public spending has reached almost 50% of our national income and yet government leaders dismiss the ominous warnings.

That shows they are poor economic managers.

The writer is a former Umno state assemblyman but joined DAP earlier this year. He is a FMT columnist.